Change In-Game Chat

General Discussion
1

This is a copy of the post here: In-Game Chat Exploit

Last night my girlfriend and I were playing a few games of quick play. Whilst waiting for the gates to open, the team was talking nonsense as you’d expect.

However, someone decided to take it a step too far and impersonate my girlfriend. It turns out if you write a message and add a tonne of spaces it’ll create a new line that allows you to type something like “[Player123]: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.” essentially making it appear as though Player123 said something. The only indication that it’s falsified is that you can’t hover over the name to right click it.

Whilst this can be a fun little thing typing something like “Hi! (Lots of spaces) [Player123]: I’m a noob heuhueheu” the user decided to write something to the tune of “I love child pornography”. This led to the other 9 players thinking she actually typed that and thus people reported her. We had to leave the game after feeling really uncomfortable as anyone would do.

We reported the player and hope they get their entire account permabanned for typing something like that and impersonating another player but this exploit/bug is way too open to abuse as is our first and only experience of this.

To the Devs I’d make one of two suggestions:

  • Clear excessive whitespace
  • Make names appear clearly different in chat (colour, font, bold, whatever…)

Do this so it can’t be falsified in a way that can dupe other players into thinking they’ve typed something they didn’t.

1 Like
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I remember someone on the tech support forum ask about this in-game message:

“There’s an unread message from Blizzard support. Press Alt+F4 to check messages. Not doing so will result in a punishment (Warning #1)”

Of course that one was a pretty harmless troll.
Less tech-savvy people are easy to fool with this sort of thing, and some people will take it too far and do outright messed up stuff with it.

I dunno what chat logs look like in reports, but I would assume that they are spaced differently.
In all likelihood the reports your GF got won’t lead to anything.

Still, it’d be a good idea to make player names a different color than the chat messages.
Should be very easy to implement, unless the chat system uses some sort of crazy spaghetti code.